Few things spur rappers to action quite like fear of falling off. Kendrick Lamar once rapped that it was a sickness, and "quite contagious." J. Cole built an entire concept album around delaying the inevitable loss of momentum. "Will I ever fall off? That day will never come / Till the pine box, b****, f*** you! I'm better than I ever was," Eminem rapped defiantly on 2017's "Nowhere Fast," well into a career downturn. To acknowledge a fall-off is to mark the point of no return; the only escape when the precipice nears is for a rapper to rediscover their mojo, whatever spark originally endeared them to artists, without earmarking their music as archaic. And mojo is a fickle thing — tough to put a finger on, harder still to reclaim.
Three albums released on Friday find erstwhile phenoms trying to recapture their sound's glow, charting various paths toward creative restoration. On FRESH, the nu-trap delegate Lil Baby seeks to reenter a flow state that delivered him onto the Billboard charts. After a surprise pivot into neo-soul earlier in the year, the pop-rap heartthrob Jack Harlow tries to defrag a fractured design with the new EP Sweet Action II. Meanwhile, the Bay Area group SOB x RBE, carriers of a local legacy, inject life back into a dormant campaign on the comeback LP From the Land. In each new project, you can trace the artist's pilgrimage back toward a defining career ethos.
Lil Baby wouldn't be a rapper at all if not for a little push. In 2017, the chameleon Young Thug, his senior in the Atlanta scene, literally paid him to get in the booth and punch in. It was a fitting origin story — rap felt second nature for Baby, yet his nonchalance betrayed an indifference to craft. The combination paid off handsomely in the late '10s and early '20s: Baby became a breakout star, highlighted by a 2020 run in which he had the most-streamed album and was named Apple Music's artist of the year. By 2023, he was a streaming powerhouse on par with Taylor Swift, sustained by tuneful, metrical flows that bored into grooves.
Over time, though, that metricality made his sound feel increasingly monotonous, and recent years have brought diminishing returns in his music. The numbers dipped, and a feud with longtime running mate Gunna further complicated public perception, as the two artists were pitted against each other in creative and commercial arms races. Every album he's released since 2020 has debuted at the top of the Billboard 200, and yet the sense that he has fallen off has followed him like a rotten smell.
In a recent interview with Popcast, Baby said he is motivated by a desire to "keep winning": "I don't think my hunger, my drive, could disappear. I think I'm a natural-born hustler. As far as making music, now, I don't know." He seemed to be setting a hierarchy of goals: satiating that hunger for success first, creating second. "That's all that's gonna be — hits," he added, somewhat counterintuitively, "because if I can't make hits, I ain't gonna make music no more." But the logic coheres deeper into the conversation, as Baby reveals that to him, "making hits" is less about performance metrics and more about simply showing up to work. While he denies that he has ever been in a slump, there is a tacit acknowledgment that swinging for the fences each at-bat is the only guaranteed way to make contact again.
In this context, FRESH sounds like a deliberate attempt to get back into his rhythm. The album's underlying premise seems to be that he requires perpetual action to achieve maximum power, and that continuous burrowing will eventually bring him to the center of his sound. In the process, he reveals calculation to be his music's defining feature: It is carefully measured, deliberately segmented, anonymous but also intentional. "Ain't read my first contract, all I knew was a drug deal / Plus the white boy told me, 'Ask 'em 40 mil for the pub deal' / That was 2020, I done ran it up and I'm stuck here," he raps on "Mr. Do Something." That characterization — "stuck" — is telling. The desire to remain at the top can be limiting, but also affirming, particularly when coming from struggle. For much of Baby's career, rapping seemed like an afterthought; here, it's clear productivity is top of mind. He sounds less concerned with proving naysayers wrong and more with just getting into gear.
After several out-and-out flops, Jack Harlow finds himself in a tougher position. If Lil Baby is trying to recalibrate his motor to the currents of a new streaming ecosystem, Harlow is rebuilding the boat in the water. He's struggled since his debut to recapture the charisma manifested in that moment, a meandering journey capped by the March album Monica, which brought on a complete aesthetic transformation — conductor hats and chunky sweaters in service of what a Times style reporter referred to as a "diet D'Angelo impression." Enter Sweet Action II, a sequel to the affable EP that produced "Whats Poppin," Harlow's breakout hit.
In rap there is a particular kind of sequel release — one that aims explicitly at a bygone version of that artist's success — that can feel like filing for bankruptcy. When Eminem clapped back on "Nowhere Fast," on the purposefully titled album Revival, he was doing so after the resuscitative efforts of 2013's The Marshall Mathers LP 2, a retread of his maniacally dextrous classic from 2000. Nicki Minaj, The Game, Ghostface Killah, Cam'ron and Jeezy have all returned to the well decades later, with mixed results. Too often it can feel like a naked ploy to give audiences what the artist thinks they want, without factoring in how the audience or artist may have changed.
Sweet Action II comes on a considerably shorter timeline, but the internet has accelerated everything, even the cycles by which artistic careers ebb, flow and die, and the Harlow project functionally serves the same purpose: reattaching to familiar IP to capitalize on its cultural footprint. It bears the hallmarks of the original, down to the cover photo, but Harlow is also looking to integrate his new self with his old one. His methods are clear: more of the laid-back verses of his earliest work, some singing sprinkled in, all subtly laced through soundscapes that nod to his past and present. There's a Babyface feature and a Tank sample, but the lyrics tease out a connection to his loverboy roots. Mileage may vary, but it's hard to deny the EP's successful course correction back toward a quintessential Jack Harlow style.
This kind of reset isn't strictly for place-hunters seeking to climb back onto the charts: In some cases, it's an effort to reestablish the momentum of a sidelined movement. Such are the conditions that have led to SOB x RBE's From the Land, a reunion album seven years in the making. In the late 2010s, the Vallejo crew was at the forefront of a revival in hyphy music, the buoyant Bay Area subculture popularized by the late rapper Mac Dre. The group's motion was such that Kendrick Lamar tapped its members to contribute to the soundtrack for the 2018 MCU blockbuster Black Panther. The members signed solo deals, threatening the unit, and when Lul G was found guilty of murder in 2019, SOB x RBE all but disbanded.
The cover of From the Land depicts the three remaining members looking up at a bat-signal projection of the SOB x RBE logo across the sky, and that is how its music is presented, like heroes answering the call. The music feels updated to accommodate the changes weathered by the group: Its rappers are more weary but no less animated, and the propulsive songs are still powered by their interplay. A long hiatus often brings rust or disrupts chemistry, but SOB x RBE seems devoted to a cause. "Know the world been waitin', long time comin' / What I spent on how I'm steppin', fifteen hundred / Know you heard n****s talk, but they ain't on nothin' / It was just me and my brothers when we had nothin'," Yhung T.O. croons. Listening, it feels like a crew embracing the stakes and picking up where it left off.
But recapturing mojo alone may not be enough to restore the feeling with one's audience. The truth of the matter is that falling off has rarely felt more relative, since the metrics of success have never been wonkier (with the charts formula being reworked again in 2027). Those numbers were always far more useful for gauging consumption than creative growth, but even niche music communities can hardly agree which cultural signifiers are important anymore. Lil Baby, for his part, clearly sees any decline of his own as a microcosm of a larger issue with the genre for which he has become an avatar, as rap's stranglehold on the charts has loosened considerably this decade. "Hip-hop has fallen off, but I'm hip-hop," he told Hot 97. "So when they say 'Baby fell off,' it's whatever — hip-hop at an all-time low, and I'm that."
A cynical way to interpret those comments is that Baby considers rap's recent setbacks to be representative of a grander artistic failing, but I choose to read them differently. "I'm hip-hop" and "it's whatever" are a package deal — him shrugging off the claims while also defining himself on hip-hop's terms, as if to say the numbers can't really disrupt the way those in the culture identify with the music, or its intangible impact. Despite any claims that Baby has fallen off, I have personally never resonated with his music more than right now. Perhaps that, in itself, is evidence that bouncing back is less about data points and more about staying true to one's purpose.
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